Little Busters!

[Miles vi Britannia]

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Finished with Little Busters, and with that I've completed another Key series. Definitely enjoyable and it has quite a few parallels with the others, but I can say that it's not quite like the other ones and for the most part I didn't enjoy this as much as those either.

The story revolves around Riki Naoe and his group of friends, the Little Busters. As a kid, his parents both died and the tragedy overwhelmed him until these friends met him and brought him along for an adventure of childhood fun and whatnot. Fast forward to their high school years and they're all still pretty close. They decide to make a baseball team to enjoy their youth and all, though they're quite a few members too short for that. This leads Riki to go find other people to join the Little Busters, and quite a lot of other stuff happens along the way.

Just like a few of the other Key stories, it takes place in a school and revolves around the male protagonist helping a lot of girls with their problems. As such, you can expect the emotional drama that all the others would have and some good character development as well. However, something to point out is that LB feels the most slice of life ish out of all of them, at least in my opinion. At its core, LB is about a group of friends and how they support each other during hard times more than anything else. While the typical Key themes are still there, the focus on friendship is much stronger in this series than in Clannad, Kanon, or Angel Beats. And I should probably note that even though the presence of baseball is a lot more important in this than any other Key series (Clannad and Angel Beats both had their baseball episodes but that was it), it's not as if LB is a sports series either. The team gathering and practice is more of a way to show the bonding of the characters, as the real focus is obviously the stories of the members and their emotional struggles.

Enjoyable as it is though, I can't help but think that it's not quite as good as some of the others. Character development is treated well, but the problem is that the arcs are pretty short. In particular, four of the girls get their own story arcs for their development. More development for more people is typically a good thing, but all of those specific arcs were typically three, maybe four, episodes long and that was it. Overall the impact was still fine and the story got across much of what it tried to, but three episodes did feel too short and by the end I felt like I wasn't quite as attached to the cast in LB as I was with Clannad or Angel Beats.

But in any case, I've heard that these arcs of the story are but a prologue for the awesomeness of Refrain. Sadly, the starting date for the Refrain anime remains unknown so I'll have to wait not so patiently for that and hope that the adaptation does the story justice. Either way, I can say that LB was a fun watch but I'd imagine that the VN probably did a lot of things better by comparison.